“They’re people who could dabble in more risky behaviour,” he said. “That it’s OK, that ‘I’ll just do it once’.”īut the types of men offering a place to stay could be more concerning during a pandemic, not less. “They think they’re in control,” said East. One of the problems is that young people aren’t seeing the danger - their need for respite is clouding everything. A gay teenager who’s told all day that they’re disgusting, who then goes on Grindr and finds a man who wants to hire them for sex at his place, can experience instead, “someone saying you’re great for the night,” said East. The appeal is twofold, he said: a break from abusive taunts or behaviour, but also a much-needed contrast - in theory. What we get a lot is people saying, ‘I’m emotionally and mentally drained, I can’t be here, I think I’ll just go on apps.’” Use survival sex instead of being at home.
Now, with family members there all the time, the pressure is unmanageable. Normally, said East, when young LGBT people are in hostile families, “they will go and stay with their friends a couple of nights a week, or go to some queer spaces to break it up”.
Now services are witnessing a new phenomenon triggered by lockdown: sex work to temporarily escape. Some of the violence was always there, but so too were the escape routes.
“There is a lot of violence and I’ve been asking young people, ‘did this happen before the lockdown?’ and a lot of the responses are, ‘Well, before, I used to go out and have this network. “I was talking with a young person yesterday whose mother threw a hot drink over them,” said Nathan East, a caseworker at the Albert Kennedy Trust. “She said, ‘If you don’t kill yourself, I’ll do it for you,’” Wyatt told BuzzFeed News. SJ Wyatt, a nonbinary 54-year-old felt forced out of their London housing co-op by a fellow resident. Middle-aged LGBT people are being forced through domestic abuse - triggered during lockdown - to go back to their parents’, decades after leaving the area due to anti-LGBT hostility. Some try other means to escape hatred within the home: by going back in the closet, playing down their gender identity or sexuality, or, more literally, locking themselves in their bedrooms 24/7.īut it is not only the young. Typically, this involves finding men on hookup apps willing to let them stay for the night, in exchange for sex - despite the social distancing orders in place. Other LGBT young people, forced to spend more time with prejudiced family members, are turning to sex work or what’s known as "survival sex" simply to escape the house temporarily. “You’re dead to me,” were the last words one girl heard last week as her clothes were stuffed into bin bags and thrown into the road, a youth worker from the Albert Kennedy Trust told BuzzFeed News.īut when made homeless and offered temporary housing - as the government has said all now should be - many are too afraid to accept it, fearing anti-LGBT hostility at shelters or B&Bs, and opting instead to sleep rough, in a car, or at a bus shelter. As a result, LGBT people are now at escalated risk of violence, hate crimes, grooming, and in particular, homelessness, they warned. The charities said the threats posed by being shut in can be distinct from the general population, often detonating the intolerance that might normally lie dormant.
In a series of interviews with BuzzFeed News, organisations that help LGBT victims of domestic abuse, as well as a recent survivor of abuse, warn of an array of new dangers this community is facing under lockdown.
But, she said, “it’s something I’m seeing more and more in the past month”. Despite years of casework, Ellis had never encountered this phenomenon before the lockdown. Some parents, who have already experienced significant prejudice outside the home, are now blaming themselves for what is happening within it - unable to comprehend why. “They’re trapped in the house, cooped up, and haven’t got anyone to let their frustrations out on except their parents,” she said. Teenagers who have never said such things before are now “lashing out” with hateful and abusive comments, Rachel Ellis from the LGBT Foundation told BuzzFeed News. While homelessness caused by anti-LGBT rejection is not new, the context within this pandemic is, and so too is abuse from children directed at their own LGBT parents. LGBT parents are suffering homophobic and transphobic abuse from their own children during the lockdown, a charity has revealed - while young LGBT people are being thrown out onto the street by parents who discover their child’s sexuality or gender identity.